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Nov 1, 2018

Facebook open-sources its Horizon AI platform

The system has been used to personalize M suggestions, customize notifications and optimize video.
If you could crack open Facebook and see the gears turning under the
social network's face, you'd find a surprising amount of artificial
intelligence being applied in all sorts of ways. As of today, the
company is pulling back the curtain and making Horizon -- the company's
end-to-end applied reinforcement learning platform that helps fine-tune
that AI -- open source.

Reinforcement learning is a commonly used tool in machine learning to
teach a wanted behavior. It works by rewarding desirable behaviors while
discouraging undesirable ones. Facebook has used Horizon in a number of
its applications in an attempt to better serve its users. According to
the company, Horizon has helped personalize suggestions from M, the
virtual assistant that appears in Messenger. It also has used Horizon to
fine-tune notifications and optimize streaming video quality.

By taking Horizon open source, Facebook is hoping to see reinforcement
learning applied in new ways. The method is typically used in robotics
and games. Google used reinforcement learning to teach its DeepMind AI
how to navigate a virtual parkour course and researchers at UC Berkeley
used the method to teach computers to be curious. Facebook believes it
could also help improve large-scale systems and applications.

Specifically, the company believes the reinforcement learning platform
can prove helpful in dealing with massive data sets. Machine learning
systems typically require engineers to create hand-crafted policies to
take specific actions -- they need to know what outcome they are trying
to achieve before making decisions. Reinforcement learning, on the other
hand, can make decisions and adapt its actions based on feedback.

Because Horizon was built on open frameworks including PyTorch 1.0,
Caffe2 and Spark, it should be available to just about anyone who wants
to get their hands on it. Facebook believes Horizon is the first
"open-source end-to-end platform that uses applied reinforcement
learning (RL) to optimize systems in large-scale production
environments." If you'd like to play around with it, you can clone Facebook's Horizon GitHub repository and try it out.